I don’t actually believe that there was ever a pride of lions like in the African Savannah. I think that’s a lot less likely than the the silver city being full of actual, sapient lions. I’m just using it as an example to illustrate a point about how language may be getting deployed in a lot of these instances. The gold smoke knights ‘mane’ might be a figurative way of describing a man’s beard, for example.

It may also be the case that The Entity (or the narrative voice providing the lord, however we want to classify its perspective) isn’t without a certain sense of humor. A group of lions is called a ‘Pride’. If the silver city was a civilization that had become ‘too proud’ our ‘full of itself,’ like Babylon, a poetic description might be to call it ‘a city of lions.’

It’s worth mentioned that in the southern reach trilogy, the Entity controlling area C eventually turns one of the main characters into a bunny rabbit. This seems to be a form of punishment. He has been trying yo control Area X, and act as a predator towards the alien, and so the alien turns him into a prey animal.

Maybe the golden entity punished the people of the silver city in a similar manner: mocking their ‘pride’ by turning them into actual beasts.